“It did not really matter what we expected from life, but rather what life expected from us. We needed to stop asking about the meaning of life, and instead to think of ourselves as those who were being questioned by life—daily and hourly. Our answer must consist, not in talk and meditation, but in right action and in right conduct. Life ultimately means taking the responsibility to find the right answer to its problems and to fulfill the tasks which it constantly sets for each individual.”
Man’s Search for Meaning by Viktor Frankl (short and cheap!). His most famous book.
– – – – – – – – – – – – –
Or, try The Meaningful Man, a CBC podcast about Frankl’s work, the Sunday Edition, Michael Enright, Oct 9, 2016. I highly recommend it. http://www.cbc.ca/radio/thesundayedition/news-from-the-red-desert-dead-mom-talking-man-s-search-for-meaning-1.3794516/the-meaningful-man-1.3794527
– – – – – –
Or, this 3.5 minute video:
“Happiness cannot be pursued; it must ensue.”
– – – – – –
he gives the example of two suicidal inmates he encountered there. Like many others in the camps, these two men were hopeless and thought that there was nothing more to expect from life, nothing to live for. “In both cases,” Frankl writes, “it was a question of getting them to realize that life was still expecting something from them; something in the future was expected of them.” For one man, it was his young child, who was then living in a foreign country. For the other, a scientist, it was a series of books that he needed to finish. Frankl writes:
This uniqueness and singleness which distinguishes each individual and gives a meaning to his existence has a bearing on creative work as much as it does on human love. When the impossibility of replacing a person is realized, it allows the responsibility which a man has for his existence and its continuance to appear in all its magnitude. A man who becomes conscious of the responsibility he bears toward a human being who affectionately waits for him, or to an unfinished work, will never be able to throw away his life. He knows the “why” for his existence, and will be able to bear almost any “how.”
– – – – – – – –
“By declaring that man is responsible and must actualize the potential meaning of his life, I wish to stress that the true meaning of life is to be discovered in the world rather than within man or his own psyche, as though it were a closed system. I have termed this constitutive characteristic “the self-transcendence of human existence.” It denotes the fact that being human always points, and is directed, to something or someone, other than oneself–be it a meaning to fulfill or another human being to encounter. The more one forgets himself–by giving himself to a cause to serve or another person to love–the more human he is and the more he actualizes himself. What is called self-actualization is not an attainable aim at all, for the simple reason that the more one would strive for it, the more he would miss it. In other words, self-actualization is possible only as a side-effect of self-transcendence.”
― Viktor E. Frankl, Man’s Search for Meaning
― Viktor E. Frankl, Man’s Search for Meaning
― Viktor E. Frankl, Man’s Search for Meaning
– – – – – – – – –
http://www.theatlantic.com/health/archive/2013/01/theres-more-to-life-than-being-happy/266805/